How to Be a Sister

SOME OF MY relationships have become trapped in the amber of my memories, and comparing the present with the past can be confusing. My fiery dad, for example, somehow became a mild little white-haired person who makes polite dinner conversation with me instead of insisting everyone shut up so he can watch TV. My ever-tired mother, who ignored my decades of nagging about exercise, is now a road-biking demon with calves of steel. We are all always changing, I know. Even Margaret, who appears to stay more the same than most people I know, is moving through time and space in her own individual life just as I am moving through mine.

I was thinking about this one day as I sat in my backyard in Oregon, watching the swallows dip and swoop over the garden. Their graceful flight paths reminded me of my childhood and the endless hours of summer sunshine during which I had had no greater responsibility than to sit on the dock and watch the birds. Of course, I was supposed to be watching my big sister, too. That much was always understood, if unspoken. Before I was conscious of being conscious, I knew enough to worry about losing track of Margaret. We siblings were all equally terrified when she wandered off on her own. Where did she go, and who was going to get in trouble for it?

My Birds of Oregon book told me that the birds I had watched as a child were the subtle-colored cliff swallow and the brighter, blue-feathered tree swallow. Arriving each spring at our lake cabin, we always found a new nest above the front door, created before we finished our own migration for the year, putting the boat in the water and navigating the icy spring waters of Lake Coeur d’Alene, our life jackets bunched up around our small ears. Swallow eggs incubate for only about two weeks, and the babies stay in the nest for about three more. Compared to our human lives, the entire childhood period of these little creatures is truncated into just a month and a half, which makes me realize I must have been watching many different bird families each summer above the front door, not just one. But at my house it was definitely only one family, the same family.

That’s part of what is so difficult about being a child in a big family: Wherever you go, there your siblings are. The ill-informed (probably “only children” themselves) might argue that this is the magical part of being a big family. But I’ll bet those people have never had to engage in a physical battle for couch space. As children, my siblings and I were afflicted by the constant and involuntary presence of one another. We crowded together around the same sticky dinner table, fought for position in front of the TV, and struggled for our hard-won minutes in the lukewarm shower while someone else was banging on the bathroom door. We loved each other, but that concept was buried deep during the moments that we battled tooth and nail for the last bottle of Pop Shop pop.

By the time I’d moved to Oregon, those days were long gone, and now we had to go out of our way to get in one another’s lives. As adults, my brothers and sisters and I inflicted ourselves on each other by choice. One way we did this was by forcing one another to participate in our hobbies. This was why I was willing to watch The Lord of the Rings with my oldest sister Ann’s family ad infinitum. And why I let Ann pay for me to get a French manicure for my birthday, even though whenever I looked at my nails I felt like a hooker. It’s also the reason why Ann, who now lived a couple of hours away from me, agreed to come to my book club. I had told her—my beautiful, conservative, army-wife sister—that we would be camping, but maybe I just assumed she’d infer the rest—that anyone who would camp out in the woods for book club would necessarily be a bunch of tree-hugging liberals. If she didn’t suspect, it didn’t show; she was so gracious at the all-organic potluck and our ensuing discussion about the evils of the logging industry. She didn’t even bat an eye when, after we’d eaten our s’mores and the kids were tucked in, someone lit up a joint; she just excused herself politely and went to bed.

SINCE I’D MOVED back to the Pacific Northwest, it was easier to connect with my siblings, at least geographically. But getting together with Ann, for example, was much easier than trying to spend time with Margaret. For one thing, Ann would answer the phone when it rang and usually didn’t hang up on me. Moreover, with Margaret this kind of interest-sharing business was fairly one-sided. With her autism, she didn’t have the kind of empathy that would make her suffer through something she didn’t feel like doing just for the sake of another person’s happiness (as Ann did by riding in my dog-hair-covered van into the darkening Gifford Pinchot Wilderness with my beloved mutt Dizzy inching deeper into her lap with every mile). That’s simply too abstract a concept. But I had non-autistic friends and relatives who were less empathetic than she was, so I wasn’t ready to give up on this project, not quite yet. I decided that the next time I went home, I was going to try to get Margaret to go hiking with me.

I had tried it once before, the summer before I moved back to the Northwest and was home visiting. Hiking was something Margaret and I had never discussed, so I didn’t know if she knew exactly what I meant when I asked her to go, but she was game to try. At least that’s the way it seemed before she slammed down the phone. “You’re going hiking with Eileen! OKAY!” SLAM!

As with our then-recent lunch date, I found myself focusing on low expectations. Just get there first and see what happens, I told myself on the car ride from northern Oregon to eastern Washington. On the appointed day, I drove five hours to get to her house, knocked on the door, and waited for her to open up. She yanked the door open and peered out at me through the screen. She didn’t say anything. There was no “Hi! How are you! How was your trip? Come on in while I grab my things.” We don’t have those bridges of small talk, no stepping-stones of cheek kissing and shoulder squeezing. She just looked at me for a few long, silent seconds. Then she said, “You’re going hiking, Eileen?” When I said yes, she grabbed her purse, brushed past me, and got in the car, slamming the door as hard as she could. Then she didn’t speak to me for the rest of the drive, which was really lovely.

Margaret does not talk much. She is definitely not on my top ten list of great conversationalists. If you ask her a question, she is apt to answer yes or no at random. So the questions “Do you want eggs or pancakes?” and “Are you going to stop spitting, or do we have to leave right now?” will elicit the same answer: “Yes?! No?!” So I wasn’t surprised or put off by her silence. Which isn’t the same thing as saying I didn’t wish for more. I hadn’t seen my sister for months. Given the choice, I’d like to know what was going on in her life and her heart. What had she been up to since we last saw each other? What was making her happy? Or sad? What had she been doing with her housemates on the weekends? But these are the kinds of questions my sister simply couldn’t answer. I had to make do with the limited information I got from the staff members at her house, who saw her every day. I had to hope that she was finding joy in her own way.

ALTHOUGH I WISHED for a foray into my sister’s thoughts, part of me didn’t mind Margaret’s quiet on this particular day. I think we could all use a bit more silence, frankly. The world is a noisy place, becoming ever more cacophonous with our cell phones, laptops, and iPods. My father-in-law can’t sleep unless the television set is on. My husband likes to read his e-mail and talk to me over breakfast while he listens to NPR and sends text messages to his chess club members. My nephews play Xbox for hours at a time and watch the same movies over and over again, often wandering away from the TV halfway through the film, leaving the volume up. I’m frequently in the car with friends or family and realize that everyone but me is talking on the phone.

I’m misplaced in the technology generation. I usually drive my car with the radio off. I recently drove thirty-two hundred miles alone without even popping in a CD. I work in a quiet room, the silence broken every now and again by the sound of my dog snorting herself awake or the cat crying to be let out, and then in, and then out again. I leave my phone off when I’m driving, writing, or—wonder of wonders—talking to another live person. Often I’ll have several messages when I turn it back on, but none of them urgent, unless you count the ones from Brendan demanding to know why my phone is off.

I grew up in a noisy household, which is part of the reason I crave quiet. But there is something more there, and it’s about observing human behavior, the nonspeaking parts of communication. The beauty of the pause, the nonverbal cue, escaped me in my younger years, but I appreciate these elements more and more as I age. I learned from Navajo students at the University of New Mexico how abrupt and foreign an Anglo style of communication could seem. To them, Anglo students and teachers talked too much and too fast. While the Navajos were waiting quietly for what they deemed the appropriate cultural pause so they could respond to a question, the Anglos would get nervous about the quiet and start chattering again, asking more questions. Then the Navajo students would have to wait some more, prompting more nervous chatter and an unfortunate cycle of miscommunication.

When I taught fourth grade in American Samoa my students clued me in a bit about nonverbal communication by teaching me that an eyebrow waggle means “yes.” As I’d stand there, hands on my hips, demanding a verbal response, they’d crack up, thinking it was hilarious that I didn’t know what they were “saying.” I just wasn’t listening. I hadn’t learned how yet.

My raucous, crowded childhood had given way to a life full of quiet and space and time, three things I’d never thought I’d have so much of. And though I’d been years away from that chaos and close quarters with four siblings, the sense of tension and disruption had stayed with me all along, and I was still trying to shake it.

AFTER ABOUT A half an hour of complete silence in the car, Margaret looked over at me and said, “Hi, Eileen!” Then she went back to looking out the window. I laughed to myself, thinking about how this quiet car ride with my sister was full of irony for me. After all, one of the reasons that my childhood home had been so loud was because of this sister who was now riding along beside me in such a state of tranquility. This scene I was experiencing was one I might have fantasized about, but had never really expected: my quiet big sister.

We drove up U.S. Route 2 to State Route 206 and north out of Spokane as KPBX played Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Margaret looked out the window and watched the scenery as her neighborhood in the quaint college district gave way to strip malls and Chinese restaurants, then big-box shopping centers. Beyond that were the rural outcroppings that had become housing developments, sparsely inhabited, then the last few working family farms, then forest. We entered Mount Spokane State Park and wound up the narrow road toward the ski area. Margaret didn’t say a word. Now and then she pressed a finger against the window and whispered something to herself. I’ve been through a lot with Margaret—violent outbursts, public nudity, explosive vomiting in restaurants—but nothing in our past could have prepared me for this long silence.

During our childhood, Margaret’s autism had made her prone to frequent, unpredictable, violent tantrums. They might occur during dinner, in the middle of the night, or in the morning, and often for no discernable reason. Was it her diet? Was it her hormones? Was it her medication? Was it her autism? It was crazy-making to try to predict or resolve the issue that might be upsetting her. But as a child, somehow I felt like I was supposed to figure out what she needed. So did my other siblings. What was the magic trick we needed to do that would make her world right again? We tried everything, and when nothing worked, we tried it all again. What else do you do when someone is screaming bloody murder if not try to figure out how to make her stop? But we were children, not autism experts, and our efforts often seemed futile. Consequently, our collective childhood was marred by the anxiety that plagued my sister and her inability to communicate with the rest of us about what she needed. So now I watched her watching the road, saying nothing, and simply marveled. Deep down, though, I was still as edgy as ever.

I glanced over at her as I drove. Margaret is three years older than I am, which at the time put her at forty. She is taller than I am and heavier, having inherited what our family calls “the McGillicuddy figure.” That means she looks like the women on my maternal grandmother’s side: tall, large breasted, carrying a little potbelly, and pencil-thin legs. She wears her brunette hair in a short, stylish cut, which highlights her lovely green eyes. Margaret often stands with her hands clasped in front of her, over her large bosom, looking for all the world like the Venus of Willendorf.

In the previous decade or so, we’d gone through extended periods of time without seeing each other, and I had held this image of her in my mind’s eye. When I lived in New Mexico, the distance was an obstacle. As a poor graduate student, I had the time to travel but often lacked the funds. Then I got a job with decent pay and a measly two weeks off a year. Margaret could never travel alone, and even with a chaperone, unpredictable plane travel was an adventure that no one was eager to try with her, especially post-9/11. But here I was, living just five hours away, trying to connect with my sister. And with only her. One-on-one, to try to bookmark the past apart from the present, the way things had always been from the way I hoped they might be.

JUST AS I wanted an adult relationship with Ann, Larry, and Mike, I was looking for a change in my siblinghood with Margaret. In the recent past, visiting with my sister had left me feeling stressed, kind of like doing a beer bong and then getting on a roller coaster. It was her outbursts that got me. “Behavioral issues” was the polite term we used when we became adults. In plainer terms that meant a visit with my sister usually included one or all of the following: being spanked, hit on the head, spit on, shoved, ignored completely for the entire week, laughed at, or pinched in that tender area between chin and Adam’s apple. (This is probably not something many people worry about, the Neck Pinch. But if you take the time to locate this spot on your neck, you’ll notice that it is, in fact, a very tender piece of corporeal real estate. Now imagine that you are just sitting around, minding your own business, and suddenly you feel like that delicate part of your neck is caught in a car door. That’s what the Neck Pinch feels like.) All those things might be repeated, at random, for the duration of a given visit. Let’s just say it was difficult to relax and have fun under these circumstances, and it was even more difficult to feel warmth toward the perpetrator of such assaults, even though this might be the only time we’d get to see each other all year.

But all these possibilities were preferable to the screaming. When Margaret got really out of control, she screamed this kind of primal scream that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Actually it made the hair on my face stand up. And I didn’t even know I had hair on my face. This noise also made me sweat in a sudden burst—a sweaty outburst, if there is such a thing. Somewhere deep down inside, I felt I was supposed to do something drastic, like run back into the jungle and drown my baby monkeys because the end of the world was coming.

When Margaret screamed, it sounded like she was trying to turn herself inside out by the force of her voice. And if that didn’t work, she was going to keep screaming until she turned the rest of the world inside out. Often when she got like this, she simply couldn’t stop. And all I wanted to do was help her stop. But rushing to her aid felt like running back into a burning building to try to turn off the fire alarm and, in my experience, was about as useful. The last time I had tried to help when Margaret was freaking out like this, I had earned myself a twisted ankle and a bruise on the back of my head; Margaret shoved me over backward when I crouched down next to the chair she’d thrown herself into and tried to reason with her.

I didn’t know how often Margaret acted like this anymore. When we were younger, the screaming had been a part of everyday life, along with the maniacal barking of the dog, my sister’s incessant record-playing, and the whine of my father’s power tools in the basement. The combination often made me feel like hiding in a quiet corner, only I couldn’t find one in our crowded house. Margaret’s tantrums were definitely the worst of all the above, and they were certainly tied to her autism and to the pain or discomfort or anxiety that she simply couldn’t explain to the rest of us. Fat lot of help we were, standing around, alternatively soothing, yelling, cajoling, pleading—or, as in my recent case, getting too close for comfort—as she tried to cope with whatever mania was coursing through her at the time.

It wasn’t just the screaming that was hard to deal with. In our young past, the waiting was often worse than the outbursts themselves. During every holiday, every birthday, every family outing, the rest of us had this feeling that something bad was about to happen. And we were usually right. We just couldn’t say when it would happen. The waiting made us nervous and jumpy. When I finally left for college, I felt like I’d been holding my breath for eighteen years.

After the rest of us left home for school and then working life and marriage, Margaret often became very upset whenever we came home to visit. She would come over from her group home, and we’d all come from our respective towns in states or countries far away. At some point in the visit, something would set her off like Old Faithful at Yellowstone, and the family would act out our choreography of dysfunction and unhappiness. I knew my family was unremarkable in this. Adult children returning home to visit are usually on their worst behavior, drawn back into a role that no longer fits, like an itchy old sweater you can’t bring yourself to give away, even though you have nicer stuff to wear, and it doesn’t go with anything else in your closet. You check your real life at the door when you cross the threshold of the childhood home. I knew that was how I’d felt. I would feel especially upset to see Margaret continuing to act out. I’d think, Man, I can’t believe she is still doing that. She was probably sitting across the room from me, thinking, My God! I can’t believe she is still acting like this. And then she’d get up and rush across the room to give me a big smack on the rear.

Remembering this, I have to admit that although I hate being spanked, watching Margaret spank someone else is absolutely hilarious. Most adults have lost that sixth sense we carry as children—the radar that alerts us to the fact that a sibling/cousin/friend/schoolmate has targeted us, is zeroing in at warp speed. Most grown-ups have forgotten to walk around with their backs to the wall to fend off a surprise attack. In this naïve and thoughtless way, they are usually completely unprepared for what they feel when Margaret swings into action. Her victims are so innocent, so vulnerable, that she has plenty of time for a running start and a complete windup: A grown man standing with a beer in his hand chatting about stocks and 401(k)s with my brother at the barbecue has no adult context for the sensation of being whomped on the rear by a near stranger. He jumps around, spilling his beer, with a child’s look of fear on his face. His fear turns to embarrassment, as if he must have done something to deserve this unexpected reprimand. Then it dawns on him that he is thirty-six, not six, and hasn’t done anything to deserve that. A look of anger creeps across his face. And there stands my big sister, hooting with laughter. “You don’t hit people on the bottom! That’s bad manners! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” But what can he do? She’s not “normal,” right?

This kind of behavior, however, was normal for us. So when I came home to visit and Margaret behaved badly, I’d get angry and sad at the same time, even though she often made me laugh, too. I’d yell at her or not, but I’d feel incredibly pissed off either way. If I yelled at her, she’d usually laugh at me. And if I tried to ignore her, she’d keep doing whatever it was she was doing, trying to get a rise out of me. I just wanted it to end, the misbehaving, so that we could all try to enjoy one another’s company. I’d leave feeling shitty, wondering if my presence was bringing out the worst in her. So now I was trying to think of how we could change things.

That was part of this whole interest-sharing concept. This effort at normalcy was a challenge for all of us siblings, because although we functioned well enough in the world separately, when you brought us together we were a bit off. We tended to act like foreign exchange students in our own country: “Oh, I see; it is customary to purchase a card and even a small gift on the anniversary of the birth of a relative or other special acquaintance.” Or, “At mealtimes, all persons enjoy eating and drinking and even visiting for an extended period of time around the table. Usually none of the participants throws food at the others.” So we tried to act normal, and though we were not fooling one another, it helped to go through the motions. We went out to lunch. We went out for coffee. We shopped. We visited our grandmother. We’d become more collectively normal, at least on the outside.

The first few times I hung out with Margaret away from my parents’ house, she shocked me with her calm. There was no hair pulling at the lunch counter. No spitting of soda back into the glass or weird grabbing motions or funny noises. One afternoon she sat at a restaurant with me, Ann, and Larry, just eating her food and smiling. Every once in a while she’d look up at us and grin. “Hi, Ann! There’s Ann!” she’d say, with real joy, over and over again.

NOW, IN THE car, we wound our way up to the top of Mount Spokane, and I decided for myself that her mood was good. I found myself wanting to believe that this new version of my sister—the quiet Margaret, the calm, happy Margaret—was the real Margaret. The staff members at her group home had remarked upon her mellowing in the last couple of years. And when we went to the Starbucks near her house recently, I’d been impressed by the sense of being on her turf. The barista said, “Hey, Margaret! How’s it going? Grande decaf vanilla latte, right?” And she didn’t say it in that “I’m-being-nice-to-the-handicapped-person-because-I-am-kind” voice. She just treated her like a regular, because that’s what Margaret was. Margaret answered her, too, and remembered the woman’s name. I didn’t feel compelled to answer for her or say, “Margaret, tell the nice lady what you want, and stop shredding your napkin,” as I might have done in the past. I always feel like such an ass when I do that, like I am betraying her by trying to get her to act “normal” for the sake of other people. But I was the odd one out this time, a stranger who had to spell out my drink order for Margaret’s barista pal.

Hiking was taking things to a whole new level. But then I reasoned that it was likely she would refuse to get in the car with me when I got to her house, so the odds were I didn’t have much to worry about. She might just say, “Nothankyou, Eileen,” and slam the door shut in my face. I was prepared for her to refuse and told myself that was just fine, that I would try again some other time. But she had already exceeded my expectations by coming with me, and I was feeling buoyed by that.

Despite my happiness, my fear stayed with me. After all, it was just the two of us. Though Margaret was once inextricable from my daily life, I was no longer accustomed to spending time alone with her. As we rode in silence, I remembered a time I had taken her with me on a study date during high school, which had seemed like such a good idea at first. We went to the Coyote Café, where I worked, and I even got them to let us sit in a part of the restaurant that was quieter. I thought she would like to listen to the music (classic rock) and eat chips and salsa and color in her coloring books while I studied for my AP exams. We were there for about five minutes before she started laughing—loudly and hysterically—and spitting great foaming mouthfuls of Coke at me and onto my books. She wouldn’t stop. Or at least I didn’t wait to see if she would. Call me a coward, but I couldn’t take it that other diners were staring, that my co-workers were taking turns coming out into the lobby to gawk at Eileen’s weird sister. We left.

That was years ago, but I was worried about what might happen and if I would be able to handle it. I was afraid and trying to pretend that I wasn’t and simultaneously wondering if I would be able to handle the thing I was pretending not to be worried about. But at least things had started out smoothly today. There we were, two adult sisters out for the day, listening to the radio and enjoying a long drive on a summer’s morning. We drove to the summit of Mount Spokane to take in the view.

Mount Spokane is the southernmost peak in the Selkirk Range, which stretches up into British Columbia and Alberta. At its peak it rises to a height of nearly fifty-nine hundred feet and stands high above the nearby collection of small lakes—Newman, Hauser, and Spirit. We had grown up just miles from here, but I had no recollection of coming up to the mountain. Isn’t that how it is? You need to be a tourist in your own backyard to figure out where you came from.

Margaret and I strolled a short trail near the summit and drank in the wild palette of silver-leafed yarrow, scarlet Indian paintbrush, and lacy spirea. With my little black dog, Dizzy, in tow, we listened to the wind in the towering Ponderosa pines. In the higher altitude it was sunny but chilly for July, something I always seemed to forget. The wind whipped through our hair as we climbed up to the stone lookout house. It was dark and cold inside. Empty, I thought. Margaret loved the echo in the long, low room, and she called out, “Well, hello, there!” to hear the sound of her own voice bounce off the chilly walls. “Hel-LOW, there!” She laughed. I laughed, too, because she sounded so normal and so cheerful, but she wasn’t talking to anyone. She was just loving the sound of her voice.

I noticed a father and his two little boys standing in the lookout. I smiled and said hello, but the dad just looked at us with suspicion and didn’t say anything. The kids stared; the youngest one said, “Hi.” “Hi!” I said back. The dad said, “Let’s go, boys,” pretending like he didn’t see us or hear me. Margaret didn’t care; she was saying, again, “Well, HELLO, there!” and laughing. But it bugged me that he ignored us. It always has bugged me, being the “normal” one and watching the adults who decide that the best way to deal with the strangeness in my sister is to pretend she doesn’t exist.

The wind and shade of the lookout cast a chill, so I gave Margaret a long-sleeved shirt, which she pulled on and zipped up against the cold. It was too small and stretched tight across her big boobs, but she didn’t seem to mind. We headed back to the footpath. Dizzy jogged along in front of us and circled back to check on us when we lagged too far behind. Dizzy sniffed Margaret’s hand as she passed, and my sister patted her gently as she danced her little canine foxtrot down the trail. We were silent listening to the wind, the creaking of the branches, and Dizzy’s prancing feet in the dust sending up puffs of red-brown dirt. Somehow the scents and colors seemed to intensify, too. We left a quiet in our wake.

For once I didn’t feel like I needed to say anything, and Margaret was all contentment, letting one moment lead to another, not having to ask what came next, when we were going home, where the car was, where Mom was, where her staff members were. I had a great time. She had a fine time, too, I think.

Please don’t think it was perfect. After all, life isn’t a Disney movie. I had to close my eyes and count to ten when Margaret decided that she really did not like the gourmet turkey sandwich I had brought for our picnic and, to demonstrate her displeasure, threw it at my head, mayonnaise side up. Yes, there are undoubtedly more appropriate ways to demonstrate one’s culinary preferences, but at least she didn’t yell or hit me. Or throw her soda can into the brush so I would have to scramble after it. She just looked at me with a bit of outrage as if to ask why in God’s name I would offer her such a piece-of-crap sandwich, and then she threw it at me. I kept counting after the focaccia bounced off my hair and into the bushes, and ultimately decided that $6.95 was a small price to pay for the peace and quiet that Margaret and I had shared up to this moment.

Dizzy was happy to take care of the rejected bun and its contents, and Margaret seemed content with the soda, chips, and cookie in her lunch box. I didn’t even say anything about the sandwich throwing. I just wiped the mayonnaise out of my hair with my napkin and handed over my bag of chips when Margaret had finished hers. She grabbed them from me without a word, tore open the bag, and ate them one by one while Dizzy sat and watched for crumbs. We all finished eating in a peaceful silence.

I still found the “peaceful silence” part amusing. This was the person who had kept me from getting a good night’s sleep for eighteen years and had sabotaged nearly every family holiday and special occasion with some bit of wild behavior. Now, here she was, sitting across from me at a worn, splintery picnic table with the wind and the sun in her face, offering me this tremendous, unlikely gift: her happiness, her contentment, her quiet. Life is nothing if not surprising.

We drove home, down the mountain, past the farms, into the city limits, where the neon lights that lined Division Street were turning on for the evening. When I took her home, Margaret let me come into her house and say hello to her housemates for about ninety seconds, which was a big concession on her part. I knew my limits and didn’t try to stay too long. She had her boundaries, and she was able to be very clear about them in her own way. I chatted with her friends as she stood behind me, nervously twisting her hands, anxious for me to leave, but not knowing how to ask. When I said I guess I’d better go, a huge smile broke out on her face. She gave me the bum’s rush out the door, her signature farewell. “Okay! Bye-bye! Thank-you-very-much-for-the-hike-Eileen! See you later! Bye-bye!” She gave me a firm shove over the doorjamb and slammed the door behind me with great gusto, nearly catching me in the ass. I stood on the porch, laughing, thinking that with Margaret there is never any doubt in your mind about whether it is time to go.

As I drove away, I kept the radio off and enjoyed the quiet. I thought about my big sister and how she kept surprising me. And I wondered about what we might do the next time I came to visit. I recalled the end of our hike when, as we walked toward the car, we hit a stretch of slippery gravel. Margaret had reached out and grabbed my shoulder to steady herself. Here is another of life’s great ironies—Margaret’s fears. This is a woman who thinks nothing about walking out into the lobby of the YWCA totally naked, swimsuit in hand, to ask someone to help her put it on. A person who would probably not think about putting out a fire in the kitchen if she happened to be listening to her favorite record. Someone who has no shame about disrupting a holy mass with some laughter or loud talking. This is a person who, as a child, once rode her bicycle downtown and out onto the highway at dusk. Suffice it to say she isn’t afraid of most things that other people are afraid of, but give her a slight incline and a little loose gravel and she is a bundle of nerves.

With her feet sliding mildly, she had grabbed my forearm with both hands and sidestepped her way carefully down the slope. After the worst of it was over, she let go of me with one hand and grabbed my hand with the other. She held on to me all the way back to the car. I didn’t mind. It was actually very nice having my big sister hang on to me. The physical contact that we take for granted when we are children or when we are with children is not easily sustained between adults. I liked feeling my sister’s slender hand in mine, her long fingers twined around my own in a silent request for moral support. The distance we’d traveled away from each other in the last two decades seemed gone in an instant. The years of anger and frustration and disappointment somehow didn’t matter for the moment as we breached all that divided us in a few moments of shared quiet with clasped hands.